


Life is to Death as Sea is to--

by spacegoth



Category: Dishonored (Video Games)
Genre: Billie has a lot of feelings but like hell does she talk about them, Gen, Grief, Post-Canon, Post-DotO, the outsider is still learning how to do this whole human thing
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2018-01-30
Updated: 2018-01-30
Packaged: 2019-03-11 14:33:42
Rating: General Audiences
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 1
Words: 1,935
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/13526298
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/spacegoth/pseuds/spacegoth
Summary: After BIllie brings a young man that was once a god back down from the mountains, they have to figure out where to go next.





	Life is to Death as Sea is to--

When his eyes have adjusted to a sunlight they have not seen for four thousand years, Billie sidles up to him, head cocked, and asks his name.

When he says nothing, she shrugs. "Fine by me; keep your secrets. Just don't think I'm going to call you by your old title, kid."

She hears the echo of Daud in her voice when she says it, and is not quite startled. Is, in some way, almost pleased. He hears it too, of course, but what he thinks of it she cannot begin to guess. But he does not object.

She sighs. "All right. Come on then, and let's figure out what in the Void we're going to do now."

*

She figures out quickly that they cannot stay in Karnaca long.

It isn't just that there are still posters of her on half the streetcorners (posters that, thankfully, no longer flicker back and forth between different versions - all that ceased the moment she emerged from the Void on Shindaery Peak). It isn't just that all she has left there is a squat in an abandoned building. That alone would be enough to move her on, but there's more: there's a heft of memories there that feels like a brick around her neck. Everywhere seems too familiar. Everywhere echoes: there is where she once took Emily in her skiff, there is where Sokolov liked to sit and sketch. 

There is where her ship had burned. The smoke had stung her eyes, her eye, but she had not cried.

And then there is _him_.

Most everyone who sees him knows there is something strange about him. When he speaks, his inflections aren't quite right, too flat or too loud by turns. He performs all the functions of a human, but clumsily: he sleeps fitfully, eats only when she reminds him to. Sometimes he even forgets to blink. He stares at the sea until his eyes sting and then rubs them, surprised by the irritation. 

That might happen everywhere, of course. And the danger of some poor soul clutching crumbling bone-charms recognizing a face seen in dreams - that might happen everywhere, too. But she catches him looking towards the mountains too often, with something between pain and longing on his young and ancient face. There are other things, darker things, the way the world seems to whisper and shift around him sometimes. Hopefully, she thinks, that will pass with time.

When the rich get ill, Billie remembers, they go to a different climate, out of the air that was thought to sicken them. Well, they aren't rich, and this isn't illness, but maybe the same principle can apply.

Still, it'll take time to plan their exit. The Dreadful Wale is gone, and the world has been shaken up by what she's done here: not just the grand deed, but the smaller ones too, the bank robbery, the raid on the Conservatory. The whole city is still shivering with it. All too easy for people to turn on the unusual, on the stranger. _The outsider_ , she thinks, not quite smiling. No, they cannot stay here, in this disarrayed city, but for now they have no choice. They stay in her ruined little apartment, surrounded by her old things, the familiarity of them jarred by his presence, a half-unwelcome guest.

*

She wakes one morning, far too early, to see him already risen - no, he is wearing last night's clothes, and his hair is unmussed: he never slept. He is looking at the poster she has kept, the last scrap she has with Daud's face on. Younger, and not quite right: the artists didn't get the set of his jawline, or the jagged topography of his scar. For a moment she is struck by a kind of symmetry, remembering Daud on his cot, much older than he looks in the etching, staring at a stolen painting of a black-eyed boy.

She props herself up on the elbow of her whole arm. "What are you doing?" she asks, not liking the strain in her voice.

"Remembering," he says.

She grunts and drags herself to her feet, stretching her back. The dawn light is filtering through the broken window, grey and dim. Winter has come to Karnaca, and even its sun has gone wan. "You need to stare at a picture for that?"

"I am forgetting them, you know. My Marked. Across the ages." He cocks his head, frowning, puzzled at his own words. "No. Forgetting is not right. I am...unremembering. I am too _small_ , now to hold them all." He draws his fingertips along the etched lines of Daud's face, with a tenderness that disquiets her. "But I will never forget him. And he is gone."

"Yes," she says, her voice going thick. Thinking of smoke and unshed tears. "He's gone. But you're still here." _Who are you talking to, Lurk?_ She fights away a bitter smile.

He frowns and looks down at his hands. They are shadowy, watery in the morning light. A sudden fear seizes her by the throat. She has seen the trails of seafoam and shadow from his fingertips before, and tried not to: he is no longer of the Void, but its touch is still on him, a magic that is half-unconscious, and dangerous for that. 

"Perhaps," he says, slow and dreamy, "nobody is ever truly gone. Perhaps, even faded remnants can be stitched - "

Before he can finish his thought Billie takes him by the chin, all her fear gone, and forces sea-green eyes to lock with hers. 

"No," she says, flat and undeniable. "He's earned his peace."

The shadows at his fingertips fade. He blinks slowly, as if coming out of a daze. The muscles of his face move under her fingers as he swallows. His eyes have a wet shine to them, now. Billie releases him, feeling faintly discomfited: she's not used to him looking this human, yet. 

"When his heart still beat, I was a wave upon the Void. When _my_ heart began to beat again, he was a passing ripple." He breathes out, shuddering and unsure. "Yet I can still hear his voice in my ear. I think I always will."

BIllie sighs. "You probably will, kid." She hesitates a moment. "I've got some experience with the weight of the dead on my shoulders. It doesn't ever go away, but you learn to carry the load."

He looks at her; he'll probably always have an unsettlingly keen gaze, she thinks. "You wondered many times whether you would find her again in the Void."

"Stop that," she says. Not angrily: she says it the way she might have said it to a fellow Whaler about to take a misstep and lose their footing on a tricky roof. 

He looks away, not quite as abashed as she would have hoped. "The dead were always beyond my reach, Billie Lurk. He has nothing to fear from me now."

 _There are others you've Marked still living_ , she almost says. Almost - surely he knows it, and if he has chosen to disregard it for now, she won't be the one to bring them to his attention. That's the last thing Emily needs, or her father - the Royal Protector, still, and surely as sick of strange magic as his daughter is. She smiles a moment at the thought of turning up at Dunwall Tower with this strange young man at her heels. No, they would not thank her for that. 

She should write, though. When it's safer. They deserve to know what happened here - all of it. 

Though how she will explain it, she has no idea. She snorts a laugh. Perhaps she'll ask _him_ to write it.

He looks up at her, his face a silent question.

"Never mind," she says. "Get some sleep - I know you haven't gotten any yet. I'll be back later."

He nods and curls up without taking his clothes off ( _I really need to get him some proper traveling clothes_ , she thinks); with his eyes closed he looks like the skinny, wounded orphan that he was, alongside the once-god.

*

"I found a ship," she tells him the moment she comes in through the balcony. He is sitting on her pallet, reading - something pilfered from the Conservatory, she thinks, in a language she doesn't know.

He looks up from his book, unblinking.

"You know we need to get away from here." They hadn't actually discussed it at all, but she assumed he was smart enough to know it. His nod tells her she was right. "Just took time to get something together. It's small, but it'll get us out of Karnaca. Once we get somewhere else we can reassess."

"Somewhere else." He closes the book carefully and stands up. "Where are we going?"

She shrugs. "We could go anywhere. Cullero. Tyvia. Dunwall - "

The moment she says _Dunwall_ his pupils blow wide with hunger, with greed, and the black swamps the green in a way that makes her go cold with the familiarity of it. Not just the blackness of his eyes, echoing an older self, but the echo of her own eyes. She recognizes the way she's looked at food when her stomach had been empty too long, at a woman's bare skin in candlelight, at the easy loyalty Daud commanded from the Whalers. _I want, I want_ : his eyes seem a maw that cannot be sated.

To think that, for a while, she'd thought he'd forgotten about them. _Emily_ , she thinks, and balls her fists: she worries for Corvo, too, but he is an afterthought. Emily is - well, she will not claim to call her _friend_ , but she'd sure as shit do whatever it took to keep her safe. 

After a while he takes a deep breath and puts his hand to his face for a moment, shielding his eyes from her sight. "Not Dunwall," he says after a while, voice half-muffled by his hand.

"Not Dunwall," she agrees, and relaxes her fists. She does not ask whether it is for now, or forever. She knows, then, he does not know the answer to that yet. Perhaps he won't know it until he knows whether it is possible to master that instinctive hunger. 

She thinks it might be his first truly unselfish act.

"Pandyssia," he says after a while, the sound of it like a spell on his tongue. 

She frowns at first, and then begins to smile. A long sea journey. An unknown horizon. A place where nobody will follow her. "Pandyssia," she echoes, one hand on her hip. "Full of bull rats and land whales and ravenous insects? Full of plague and madness? _That_ Pandyssia?"

"I was born in the Isles," he says. "I have died there once before. Perhaps the next time I die, it can be somewhere else." He smiles at her, then: the first true smile she has seen him grant, human and not human all at once. "Yes. That Pandyssia."

 _He won't ask me to come. He'd get on any boat I'd put him on, with thanks_. She nods to him, their smiles now almost mirrors of each other. _I wonder if he knows I'd never let that happen._ "That's going to take some time to arrange."

"Time," he says, as if it's an exotic treat he's always dreamed of sampling. "Yes. I suppose it will."

"First things first." She turns away from him and busies herself with making up her bed. "Breakfast? You need to eat something, you know, and not just every other-"

"Billie?" 

She stops - turns back around.

Still smiling, he tells her his name. 


End file.
